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Today was the day the world ended.
No, to be precise, it was not the world itself.
It was a game implemented within cyberspace. A fictional world built from countless servers and data, virtual skies and lands, monsters and dungeons, cities and guilds.
[YGGDRASIL]
Once hailed as the greatest DMMO-RPG in the world.
Countless players had fought within it, taken from one another, defended what was theirs, and built things up.
For some, it had been a hobby. For others, a battlefield. And for still others, a place as real as reality itself.
For me, it had been the latter.
In reality, I lacked for nothing.
A residence in the upper city.
A body maintained free of even a single genetic illness.
An environment where I could learn anything I wished.
Wealth enough to spend without ever exhausting it.
A family others would envy.
A safety net that would let me rise again even if I failed.
I had all of it.
Which was why it was stranger still.
Though I lacked nothing, there was nothing I wanted.
Food had no taste.
People's words sounded like noise.
Congratulation, expectation, advice, consolation—none of it ever reached whatever lay within me.
The world was like a well-made room.
Spacious, clean, safe, and warm.
But the room had no door.
I had known for a long time.
That someday, I would have to leave that room.
That day was today.
The day YGGDRASIL's service ended.
For the last time, I logged in.
My view changed.
The white ceiling and sterile lighting of reality vanished, replaced by a vast, dark throne room. Blue flames burned in rows across the black marble floor. The ceiling rose so high its end could not be seen, and decorations that looked as though they had been carved from the bones of dead gods hung upon the walls.
This was a place I had created.
One being stood before a massive mirror.
It was not human.
Black armor.
A long sword split with silver.
Dark wings swaying slowly behind its back.
Its skin was pale, and its eyes held a strange light that was neither red nor blue.
Even while suppressing its mana, the space beneath its feet warped little by little.
My avatar.
Level 100.
A heteromorphic being.
A magic swordsman hybrid build.
Instant-death effects, mental attacks, status ailments, elemental attacks, physical attacks, temporal effects.
Nearly every resistance I required had been completed.
After fusing with the World-Class Item I had obtained at the end, it was difficult to call this thing a mere player character.
The World-Class Item did not appear in my equipment window.
Nor was it in my inventory.
Rather than an item, it had melted into the very existence of my character.
Mental interference was repelled.
Domination effects did not work.
Most effects that interfered with fate, information, or space were resisted as well.
Of course, it was still only a game.
It meant nothing in reality.
I did not sit upon the throne.
There was no reason to.
I had no desire to act like a king, nor did I intend to drown in sentiment during the final moments.
I merely stood before the mirror and looked at my character.
It was strange.
This face felt more like me than my face in reality did.
This name felt more familiar than my real one.
Eugene.
My player name.
The name I had never abandoned, even at the end.
The list of logged-in players was nearly empty.
Once, the chat window had been deafening. Fights, trades, jokes, insults, strategies, invitations, betrayals. It had been full of such things.
But now, it was quiet.
Most people had already left.
They had accepted that the game was ending and returned to reality.
I had no intention of returning.
When the service ended, I intended to end as well.
It was not a thought I had entertained only recently.
It was closer to something that had been decided long ago.
There was nothing in reality that I wanted.
This world was ending today, too.
Then what remained was simple.
With the world that was ending, I would end as well.
A system message appeared.
Ten seconds until service termination.
I did not close my eyes.
Nine seconds.
The flames in the throne room flickered.
Eight seconds.
The me in the mirror looked back at me.
Seven seconds.
Was that me?
Or was it what I had wanted to become?
Six seconds.
Either way, it did not matter.
Five seconds.
I regretted nothing.
I had never loved anything enough to regret it.
Four seconds.
Not reality.
Not my family.
Not my wealth.
Not even my name.
Three seconds.
It all must have been meaningless.
Two seconds.
The World-Class Item shone.
I frowned.
Something was wrong.
One second.
Under normal shutdown procedures, there was no reason for an item's effect to activate at this point.
Zero seconds.
The world went dark.
It should have.
But darkness did not come.
Instead, I felt something opening deep inside my body.
There was no system message, no logout window, no error notification.
All that happened was that every piece of data I possessed was turned inside out in an instant.
Level.
Race.
Class.
Skills.
Magic.
Resistances.
Equipment.
The World-Class Item.
None of it was dismantled.
None of it was deleted.
Instead, it seemed to burrow into me.
What had been virtual numbers solidified like bone and blood.
What had been equipment became not gear, but organs.
Mana? Magic? Things that had been close to systems within the game now felt like instincts, sensations as natural as knowing how to move my limbs.
For the first time, I was flustered.
My body would not move.
More precisely, it was moving.
I felt my lungs open on their own, cold air forcing its way inside. My heart pounded far too quickly. My fingers curled without purpose, and my limbs flailed in directions wholly different from those I commanded.
Yet I could not cry.
Only a short breath escaped my throat.
My body was small.
No—small was not enough to describe it.
I could not even hold up my head.
My vision was blurry, and my limbs could barely muster strength. Even the feel of air and cloth against my skin was unnecessarily vivid.
Someone lifted me up.
I heard an unfamiliar voice.
A woman.
I could not understand her words.
But I could distinguish the tremor in her voice and the rhythm of her breathing.
Tension.
Worry.
And the hope of being relieved.
The woman rubbed my back. She checked the movement of my chest and the color of my lips. Only after confirming that I was breathing did the tension leave her face somewhat.
A man's voice rang loudly through the room.
He too was speaking an unfamiliar language.
He was loud.
I tried to focus my gaze.
It did not come easily. Yet the positions and movements of the blurry shapes reached me with excessive precision.
It was unlike the senses of my previous life.
I could see little.
But the flow of air against my skin, the warmth of those around me, the direction of footsteps, and people's breathing all connected as a single stream of information.
It was a precision difficult to explain through human senses alone.
I tried to move my hand again.
I could not even extend a single finger as I wished.
Only then did I accept the possibility.
This was neither an injury nor paralysis.
A body whose nervous system had not yet fully developed.
The body of a newborn.
At that moment, I heard a short breath from beside me.
It was not crying.
It sounded more like a small cough.
I turned my hazy gaze to the side.
There was another baby.
About the same size as me.
A body that seemed to have been born at the same moment as mine.
That child was not crying either.
That alone might not have been strange.
But his eyes were different.
A newborn's eyes could not properly follow objects.
Yet the child beside me was looking around the room.
The person holding him.
The direction from which voices came.
The window through which light entered.
And finally, me.
His gaze stopped.
With eyes that could not even focus properly, he was unmistakably looking at me.
The change in his face was slight.
His eyes trembled.
His breathing stopped for a moment, then resumed.
His lips moved, but no sound emerged.
I knew that reaction.
The blankness of being unable to understand the situation.
The judgment that began immediately afterward.
It was a sequence that could not exist in a newborn.
There were not many possibilities.
In fact, there was only one.
That child, too, had been born with memories.
A reincarnator.
I did not know exactly what he remembered.
I did not know where he had come from, or why he had been born here.
But at the very least, he was the same kind of foreign object as me.
A being who already possessed one lifetime within the body of a newborn in this world.
The man laughed.
The woman smiled with an exhausted face.
Someone else checked on the two babies and let out a breath of relief.
Unfamiliar words passed back and forth through the room.
I still could not understand their meaning.
But I understood the situation well enough.
I had been reborn.
An unknown world.
Unknown people.
A body given to me without my having chosen anything.
And another reincarnator, born at the same moment.
We were twins.
I did not think it was funny.
Nor was I happy.
I simply could not understand.
Why something I had thought was over had begun again.
Why another life followed the one I had never intended to return to.
I looked within myself.
My body was that of a newborn.
But that was not all.
Far deeper than my flesh, a familiar structure remained.
The existence I had once chosen and completed.
The form composed of race and class, countless powers and pieces of equipment.
I did not know whether I could use all of it immediately.
But it had not disappeared.
I had been born as a human child.
But I was not a being made solely of humanity.
The woman held me to her breast.
She was warm.
Her body heat and heartbeat passed through my skin.
It was not unpleasant.
Neither was there any reason to judge it especially pleasant.
And yet, the tension in my body eased somewhat.
I classified it as physiological calm brought about by the maintenance of body temperature.
The child beside me was also being held in someone else's arms.
He was still looking at me.
I looked back at him as well.
We could not speak.
We could not ask who the other was.
But at least I knew one thing.
I was not the only utterly unfamiliar being in this room.
I slowly closed my eyes.
I was alive.
Alive once again.
That fact did not make me happy.
At least, that was what I thought at the time.
A life I had not wanted.
A beginning whose reason I could not know.
And so my second life began.
————
Basic Settings
Eugene
Racial Levels
[Astral Chimera] / Race / Basic / Lv. 10
[Nephilim] / Race / Advanced / Lv. 5
[Protean Eidolon] / Race / Rare / Lv. 5
Class Levels
[Fighter] / Class / Basic / Lv. 10
[Sword Master] / Class / Advanced / Lv. 10
[Magic Swordsman] / Class / Basic / Lv. 15
[Elementalist] / Class / Advanced / Lv. 10
[War Wizard] / Class / Advanced / Lv. 10
[Spellblade] / Class / Advanced / Lv. 10
[Arcane Duelist] / Class / Rare / Lv. 5
[Chrono Knight] / Class / Rare / Lv. 5
Special Class Levels
[World Edge] / Class / Rare / Lv. 5
Unlocked through possession of a World-Class Item and a specific quest. Grants various resistances, resistance to mental magic, and [Beyond-World Manifestation].
Status
These values are taken from the YGGDRASIL character sheet. The rule effects of the World-Class Item and adaptation after being transported to another world cannot be converted into fixed stats.
- HP: 72
- MP: 84
- Physical Attack: 83
- Physical Defense: 75
- Agility: 90
- Magical Attack: 86
- Magical Defense: 82
- Special Resistance: 94
- Special: 100
Damn great first chapter